Vivint Home Security System Review: Pro Install vs. DIY

Published July 25, 2018

Your guide

Rachel Cericola

After spending eight weeks with a Vivint Smart Home smart security system, we’d recommend it only if you feel more comfortable having a professional installer choose, place, and install all of the elements of your system and aren’t put off by the installation fee, the high price of the hardware, the relatively costly monthly subscription, or the locked-in contract. Vivint boasts an easy-to-use app, a speedy response time, and white-glove installation service, but it can be expensive and doesn’t offer many perks over a good self-installed system.

Buying Options

The Vivint Smart Home security systemis geared toward people who don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to security—or don’t want to spend the time learning. It has a lot of great perks, including Vivint-branded sensors, cameras, and other add-ons; fast response times; support for popular smart-home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers and Philips Hue lighting; and an option for 24/7 camera recording. However, the starter kit currently costs more than double the price of similarly configured self-installed systems like SimpliSafe, our current top security system pick.

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The research

Why you should trust us

I’ve written about consumer electronics for more than 15 years, and I’ve tested a variety of smart-home devices, from remotes and security cameras to AV receivers and speakers. As a former editor for Electronic House and Big Picture Big Sound, I’ve written buying guides for multiple consumer-electronics categories. I’ve also done tech-related work for Wired, Woman’s Day, GeekMom, Men’s Health, and others.

How Vivint is different from other security systems

Vivint is a professionally installed system, which means sales representatives first help you pick the appropriate products (usually over the phone, but they also send fleets of door-knocking reps), as well as the best places to install them. Then technicians come to your house and set it all up. You don’t need to know anything about security or wireless signals, or even own a ladder; they handle everything.

Of course, a lot of security companies do that. Vivint sets itself apart with the number of branded sensors, cameras, and other system components it offers. A basic starter kit includes the touchscreen control panel, two door/window sensors, one motion sensor, and two Google Home Mini speakers (for voice control) for $600. You can customize the system by adding a doorbell camera, a smart lock, indoor and outdoor cameras, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, sensors, a garage door opener, a smart thermostat, and more. Serving as the brains behind the system, the SkyControl 7-inch touch panel supports cellular service, Wi-Fi, and Z-Wave, so most of the add-ons don’t need to be hardwired, and the system can link to different smart-home devices. It also works out of the box with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Philips Hue lighting, Kwikset SmartCode locks, and Nest thermostats. A newer Smart Home Hub is replacing the SkyControl panel; they look similar, but the new controller has a longer battery backup.

The company charges a $200 installation fee in addition to the price of the hardware, and it offers two monthly plans: $40 per month for the Smart Home package or $50 for the Smart Home Video package. Without either of those, you’re limited to local service, which means you get loud alarms in your house and service from the panel but no monitoring, no app, no alerts, and no smart-home integration.

If you don’t want to pay the equipment fees up front, Vivint allows you to roll those costs into your monthly subscription. (Either way, you pay the installation fee.) However, if you do that, you’re locked into a five-year agreement. If you pay up front, you can cancel the service at any time without penalty—but then you’ll have the equipment collecting dust, and most of it is incompatible with all other security systems.

The Smart Home Video plan adds 20-second video clips for indoor and outdoor cameras and 30-second clips for the doorbell camera, for up to four cameras (the max Vivint recommends for any system), which can remain in storage for up to 14 days. You can also opt for 30 days of continuous DVR recording with the purchase of the 1 TB Vivint Smart Drive for $250. The overall cost for the video service and the Vivint Smart Drive is about $100 more than the $750 you’d pay annually for Nest Aware for four cameras. Unlike Nest though, Vivint deletes all of your video history at the end of those 30 days, but you can download clips you want to save permanently so long as they’re five minutes or shorter in length.

Vivint also offers a 120-day warranty on service and a lifetime warranty on equipment for as long as you’re a customer. If something goes wrong, you can contact customer service online or by phone to get walked through a fix. If you need someone to come out to your house, expect to pay a $50 fee for each visit.

How we tested

We had two local installers set up our Vivint system, which included the SkyControl 2.0 7-inch touchscreen, a doorbell camera, one outdoor camera, one indoor camera, a smart door lock, two entry sensors, one motion sensor, one glass-break noise sensor, two smoke detectors, two carbon monoxide detectors, and one Vivint Smart Drive.

To keeps things simple for this review, we all agreed to confine most of the equipment to the first level of the home. The exceptions were an additional smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector, which the installers suggested for the upstairs hallway to get maximum coverage. The installers also made other placement suggestions. For instance, they placed the motion sensor high up in an open dining room, where it would also get full “view” of the entryway and living room. They situated a glass-break sensor across from a sliding glass door in the kitchen. They also picked the best spot for the outdoor camera based on the area it would cover outside as well as where they could drill through the house and reach an available outlet. Throughout the installation process, both installers were very courteous, from donning paper booties to keeping the indoor mess to a minimum to keeping me in the loop about what they were doing and where they were planning to install components.

We then spent eight weeks accessing, controlling, and tweaking the system from the SkyControl panel, the iOS app (using an iPhone 7), and the Vivint Web portal. We armed and disarmed the system, peered through cameras, and monitored visitors through the doorbell. We even integrated our Amazon Echo Dot so that we could call out commands using Alexa. We triggered the system six times to gauge reaction times for Vivint’s monitoring center located in Eagan, Minnesota.

What we liked

Photo: Rachel Cericola

The absolute best part about the Vivint Smart Home security system is that you don’t have to be knowledgeable about security to get it going. You don’t have to know what components you need, where to install things, and how to operate it. The Vivint team guides you every step of the way.

When you first contact the company, the representatives talk with you about your wants and needs, the size of your home, and the nature of its surroundings. If your house is big and adjacent to woods, you may want outdoor cameras pointing at every angle. If you live in an apartment with big windows, they may suggest motion and glass-break sensors. For me, this consultation process took about 30 minutes.

The Vivint installers also know the optimal locations to install the sensors and cameras, and they climb ladders, drill holes, and twist wires, both inside and outside the house. My installation lasted about three hours, which included hooking up the Vivint Smart Drive to collect 24/7 action from all three cameras, running a wire through the side of my house to the outdoor camera pointing at my backyard, and ending with a quick tutorial on how to use the panel and the iOS app. You don’t have to do or figure out anything yourself.

Currently, Vivint offers more smart devices than any of the other security systems we’ve tested. The company has its own video doorbell camera, outdoor and indoor cameras, smart thermostat, smoke detectors, smart plug, and more. We didn’t find those devices to perform as well as Wirecutter’s top picks in those categories, but you can operate everything from one app as well as integrate many popular smart-home devices, which is nice if you want all your devices to work as one system. You can integrate many of them by creating Custom Actions, a process that allows you to automatically do things like disarm the system when you unlock the door with the keypad, lock the door at the same time each night, disable privacy mode on the cameras when the system is armed, and much more.

Vivint also has something we look for in all home security systems: a quick response time. During our tests, a piercing, 110 dB alarm went off within five seconds of being triggered, while simultaneously sending a notification to our smartphone. After about 50 seconds, the monitoring service tries to reach out to the customer directly through a speaker in the control panel. If no one responds, the service calls your contact number. In our experience, this call typically came through less than two minutes after the initial local alarm.

Vivint’s app supports basic functions such as arming the system, locking the door, and checking on cameras, but some of the detailed settings are limited to the control panel.

The smartphone app lays everything out nicely, has an easy-to-use design, and gives you quick access to features like locking the door and arming or disarming the system. Vivint customizes parts of the app for you based on what devices make up your system: For instance, my menu includes one-tap access to my Nest thermostat, a Devices tab for flipping a Vivint smart plug on and off, and an Activity timeline that keeps a thorough list of everything that happens in and around the house.

The Cameras tab offers a snapshot of all the connected cameras. For a live peek, tap the appropriate camera, and you go to a separate page in the app. From there you can view 20-second clips of any motion the indoor and outdoor cameras have captured (or 30 seconds from the doorbell). Each individual page also provides settings for notifications, as well as a slider toggle that can put cameras into a privacy mode. If you have the Vivint Smart Drive, you can tap the Playback option from the main camera page to check out 24/7 footage from any camera. Just know that the drive stores footage for only 30 days, and at the end of that time period, Vivint wipes everything out.

What we didn’t like

When the cameras worked, they delivered good images, but they dropped offline without notification, and we couldn’t curb the nuisance alerts to our satisfaction. The motion events listed in the right screenshot are all from grass waving in the wind.

If you don’t want to deal with the hassle and know-how associated with picking out and installing a security system, it’ll cost you. The system installed in my small, 1,250-square-foot home cost about $1,700, which is more than twice the cost of our top home security system pick configured with a similar complement of sensors.

Vivint doesn’t recommend more than four cameras and one panel per home, and those four cameras require at least a 1 Mbps upload speed (or a 2 Mbps upload speed for up to four cameras and a Vivint Smart Drive). This may be a big deal if you have a larger home. My tiny home had one doorbell camera covering the front, one outdoor camera for the backyard, and one indoor camera in the living room. A larger home may need another one or two cameras outside and another one inside, which this system just can’t handle. For comparison, Nest allows 10 cameras per home, and Logitech promises support for an infinite number of cameras. (Of course, whether all of those cameras work is dependent on your network’s bandwidth.)

Vivint’s cameras also lack a lot of features we expect on security cameras. The doorbell camera records at only 720p resolution (the Ring Video Doorbell 2, our doorbell camera pick, records at 1080p), the outdoor camera doesn’t include audio (the Nest Cam Outdoor does), and none of the Vivint models have geofencing or person detection (both the Logitech Circle 2 and Nest Cam Outdoor include geofencing and person-detection options). Vivint’s indoor and outdoor cameras do have activity zones (the doorbell cam does not), which allow you to pinpoint specific areas for monitoring. However, I still got an annoying amount of false alerts on the outdoor camera due to wind and shadows, and the indoor model often reacted to my 25-pound dog.

The Vivint doorbell camera delivers a wide, 180-degree view, but it’s expensive for a 720p camera.

Also, the system doesn’t alert you when the cameras go offline. One weekend I decided to check the doorbell camera to see who had been coming and going while I was out of town, but I found that it had disconnected from the network. Most of the Wi-Fi cameras Wirecutter has tested send smartphone notifications, emails, or texts to alert you to a disconnection. To reconnect it, Vivint’s technical support suggested that I reboot the network, the camera, and the panel (in that order). The last step ended up knocking out the outdoor camera, which then needed a reboot as well. If you’re not comfortable restarting the equipment yourself, Vivint customer service can do it remotely, without the need for a service call—most of the time.

In my case, however, I needed to delete the doorbell from the system and reinstall it. Removing and adding equipment to the system is not something Vivint can do remotely; that requires a service visit, and that costs you $50.

This may seem like a lot, but for people who can’t or don’t want to do things themselves (say, the system is installed in a rental house, or you aren’t tech-savvy enough to deal with network issues) it is a selling point, since DIY systems limit you to online and phone help, and you have to seek out assistance on your own for anything you can’t take care of yourself.

Although the app is very easy to use, it gives you limited access to settings; most of those are available only on the SkyControl panel. That means you can’t make certain changes remotely. While out of town one weekend, I was getting an insane amount of motion alerts from the backyard camera. The app allowed me to turn those off, but I had to make adjustments to the sensitivity or zones later, on the panel.

Vivint offers very little customization for the audible in-house alarm. You can opt to turn verbal cues on and off, but you don’t get any additional sounds or volume adjustments. You can change the exit and entry delay times, but you need to contact customer service to do that.

We had a pleasant experience with customer service, but we should note that Vivint has a track record of disgruntled customers. A quick Google search found a lot of complaints about sales tactics, rude staff, and binding contracts. Although we could find such complaints about almost any company, Vivint’s entry in Better Business Bureau records is alarming: At last look, Vivint had 936 reviews, and 72 percent of those were classified as negative. That translates into a C+. My experience as a “typical” customer through the call center was nothing but positive, however.

Is Vivint worth it?

Can you put a price on home security? Vivint has—and it’s quite high. However, that amount buys you personalized guidance and in-home service. It also buys you a speedy response and a lot of smart-home integration, allowing you to tie this security system into your lighting, appliances, and more. That said, the Vivint system I tested had a few equipment quirks, most notably with the cameras. Also, the core security benefits aren’t any better than what you get with cheaper, self-installed systems, and concierge follow-up service comes with additional costs. So if you’re comfortable with mounting sensors and climbing ladders to install cameras, you probably don’t need the hand-holding (and associated cost) of a Vivint system.